Layover

by David Bell

  I grabbed my carry-on and headed for the concourse.

  8

  I checked the board as I left the Keg ’n Craft. I found the flight—the only one in that terminal—departing for Nashville. My heart was thumping against my rib cage, and when I saw the word “boarding,” it started to pound with more force.

  I caught the gate number—I knew from experience it was halfway up the terminal—and started moving. Enough time had passed since my arrival in Atlanta that the concourse had grown more crowded. As I headed toward the gate, I encountered every manner of clueless and slow traveler. An elderly couple with canes shuffled across my path, forcing me to swerve to the left to avoid hitting them. A woman holding a baby, her other hand attached to a screaming child, studied another departure board, and I sidestepped around them.

  Then I saw the same two cops who had strolled by the Keg ’n Craft while I’d waited for Morgan to return from the bathroom. They were across the concourse from me, moving in the opposite direction and watching everything. As I dashed past them, their heads swiveled and I half expected to be tackled from behind and wrestled to the ground at any moment.

  But I managed to reach the Nashville gate without incident. A line of people moved slowly into the retractable jet bridge, their feet shuffling as they held out their boarding passes to a smiling airline employee in a blue suit. I looked for Morgan. A brief fantasy came to my mind. She’d see me. She’d smile. She’d beckon me to her. Or maybe she’d get out of line and come to see me.

  But I saw no sign of her.

  She must have already boarded. Or maybe she was on a different flight.

  That thought brought me to a stop. What if Morgan wasn’t even on that plane?

  I took a step back, looked at the departure board again. I scanned through the list of cities. Baltimore, Dallas, Las Vegas, Nashville . . .

  Still only one flight for Nashville.

  Unless she’d lied . . .

  “Can I help you, sir?”

  A middle-aged man with thick glasses and thinning hair stood behind the counter. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and a dark blue tie.

  “Is this the only flight to Nashville?” I asked.

  “The only one we have right now.” He looked down at his computer screen. “There’s another scheduled in two hours.”

  “Can I get on this one? I had a change of plans.”

  “I can check,” he said, although he didn’t look very happy about it. “It’s pretty full. Might be overbooked.”

  My heart sank. But still he asked for my boarding pass and started tapping away. He pounded at the keyboard as if it had offended him. And while he did, I looked out at the plane, the long silver tube that probably—likely—held Morgan.

  Then I realized I had a problem: I hadn’t taken my second Xanax yet.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “What’s that?” the man asked.

  “Nothing. How’s it looking?”

  “We don’t have anything.”

  The pent-up air I’d been holding in escaped my lungs. It wasn’t meant to be.

  But then the man went on. “Nothing in coach at least. I can get you in first class.” He looked over at the line to the jet bridge. “The last group is boarding.”

  I didn’t hesitate. Not then. Not the way I felt. Not with the memory of the kiss and the conversation and everything else. I had to gamble. Chips to the center of the table, cards faceup.

  “I’ll take it.”

  “There’s a fee, plus the seat upgrade—”

  “Just do it. I’m a member. I have tons of miles.”

  The man looked at the screen again and nodded. “I guess you do. You travel with us a lot, Mr. Fields. And we appreciate your business.”

  “And I appreciate you getting me on that plane.”

  “Oh, wait,” the man said. He started shaking his head. “Our computers have been glitchy all morning.”

  I looked over and the entire line of people had passed through the jet bridge. The woman who’d been collecting tickets moved toward the door and started to swing it shut.

  “Am I on or not?” I asked.

  “Hold on—”

  “They’re closing the door.”

  The man kept tapping away, and then he looked over his shoulder to the gate. “Just a minute, Gwen.”

  He sounded too casual, too relaxed. Didn’t he know I was dancing on the edge of a knife? That I was changing the course of my life based on a brief but intense conversation in a bar?

  And a kiss. I could not, would not, forget that kiss.

  “Ah,” he said. “Got it.”

  Then something started printing—my boarding pass. It came out, and the man handed it to me.

  “There you go.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And, sir?”

  I looked back for the briefest second. “Yes?”

  “Have a safe flight.”

  I thanked him again and darted for the door to the jet bridge.

  9

  I hustled down the jet bridge alone, my carry-on banging against my side.

  An image of my dad flashed in my mind. I wouldn’t ever be able to explain this to him, wouldn’t even know how to try. But I also felt a secret rush that I was doing something I knew would piss him off. It was a juvenile way to think, of course, but I couldn’t help myself. There’d be hell to pay, but I’d face it later.

  The flight attendant smiled at me and checked my boarding pass as I entered the plane. I was in the third row, aisle seat, right at the front. Everyone in first class was seated, and I looked past them, through the passageway to the coach section, where a few stragglers were blocking the aisle, stowing their bags overhead. I scanned the faces quickly, of those sitting and standing, but I couldn’t see her.

  The flight attendant came along beside me, gently placing her hand on my shoulder. “We have room for your bag right here.” She took it and lifted it into an overhead bin across the aisle from my seat. “If you’d just settle in now, sir.”

  “I have to go back there. I have to see someone.”

  As if on cue, another flight attendant appeared from coach, stepped through the passageway, and pulled the curtain shut behind her.

  “We’re close to takeoff, sir,” the attendant by my side said. “We need everyone to buckle in.”

  “It won’t take long—”

  “You’ll be able to do that once we’re in the air,” she said, straining to remain patient. “Once the captain decides it’s safe to turn off the ‘Fasten Seat Belt’ sign.”

  I stood frozen in place. I contemplated ignoring the flight attendant’s wishes and just going back there to find Morgan. If she was even there. I took one step in that direction, but I knew it would be pointless. They wouldn’t let me. And for all I knew they’d throw me off the plane if I tried.

  How long until that seat belt sign went off?

  Fifteen minutes? Twenty?

  I hated to wait. But I had no choice.

  “Okay, okay,” I said and finally sat down.

  I saw the relief on her face, the belief that she’d avoided finding herself in one of those viral videos of an unruly passenger being dragged from a plane. I buckled up and pulled out my phone, hoping to take advantage of the few minutes before electronics had to be shut off.

  I texted my dad, trying to tell him . . . but I didn’t know what to say.

  On the jet bridge, just minutes before, I’d experienced the thrill of doing something I knew was going to irritate my father to no end. Sitting on the plane, as the flight attendants gave their instructions and the plane rolled back from the gate with the soft hum of the tires against the tarmac, I started to dread the fallout from my impulsive choice. I didn’t regret it. Not at all. But I knew how unpleasant it would be with my dad. And even though I was a grown man, I hat
ed to disappoint him.

  I’d rarely acted out as a teenager. I’d sensed intuitively how overwhelmed he was playing the role of single father while also trying to run a business. Once, when I was fifteen, I drank too much and vomited all over the bathroom floor. He chewed me out, his voice piercing my brain with greater sharpness than the hangover. And then, when I was sixteen, I reached out to my mother without telling him, asking her if I could come and visit that summer. He was madder about that than he’d been about the drinking, and he proceeded to give me a long, detailed lecture about the many ways my mother had failed us.

  My mother never responded to me. And I never saw her again.

  But mostly my dad and I got along. I respected him for the work he did—both as a father and as a businessman. I knew the sacrifices he’d made, the hours he’d devoted to building his company, the opportunities he’d afforded me. It made it basically impossible to contemplate telling him I wanted to quit and do something else.

  So I wrote quickly, trying not to overthink.

  Dad, long story. Problem with flight. I won’t make the meeting on time. Call you later.

  And then the flight attendant was next to me, asking me to turn the phone off. Only then did it sink in that we were taxiing down the runway, the pilot’s tinny voice over the speaker telling the crew to prepare for takeoff.

  The Xanax rattled in my pocket like dice. Too late to help.

  I gripped my armrests as tightly as I could and wished for one more drink.

  We sped down the runway, the plane accelerating almost as fast as my anxiety, the tires rumbling against the pavement, and then my stomach dropped as we lifted into the air.

  10

  Kimberly ate a sandwich at her desk, tuna on wheat from the shop across the square. She knew it would serve as breakfast and lunch and maybe dinner, so she tried to chew it slowly and enjoy the experience of eating rather than just shove food down her throat to satisfy a late-morning biological need. But she lost herself in the process of reading a report about Giles Caldwell’s business dealings, and before she knew it, the sandwich was gone, having disappeared and leaving her no real memory of eating it.

  “I did it again,” she said out loud. “I need to slow down.”

  She’d also bought a homemade chocolate chip cookie so big it looked like a small saucer. She unwrapped the cellophane, the gooey chips sticking to it, and took a large first bite, savoring it in her mouth in a way she hadn’t with the tuna.

  “That’s good,” she said to the half-empty office. Phones had been ringing with greater frequency and her coworkers had been moving with more speed and urgency for the past day, ever since Giles Caldwell had been reported missing.

  The meeting with the mayor that morning had been short and decidedly unsweet. Elena Robbins was in her second term, hoping for a third. She was in her mid-sixties and had spent thirty years becoming a millionaire selling tires to trucking companies. Then she decided her second act would be as mayor of Laurel Falls, Kentucky.

  In the meeting, Mayor Robbins spoke and the cops listened. She enumerated Giles Caldwell’s contributions to the town, both in business and in philanthropy. She reminded the police they had a funding measure on the ballot the next month, one that could be used to hire more officers and upgrade their equipment.

  “Voters won’t vote for it if you can’t find a grown man in a town of sixty thousand people,” Mayor Robbins told them. “They won’t vote for you if they don’t feel safe in a town this size. It’s almost a day since this was reported. Maybe more since he’s been gone.”

  Kimberly wanted to say, Maybe he doesn’t want to be found, but she held her tongue. The cops were in the room to listen. To get their marching orders from the mayor.

  Find Giles Caldwell. Soon.

  Kimberly knew finding him meant more time away from Maria. The chance at the promotion . . . or the chance to fail spectacularly in the biggest case in years. Laurel Falls had a few homicides every year, almost always solved quickly. Unexplained and unsolved disappearances were even rarer. How long would this take?

  So the guilt flooded back. She and Maria liked to split one of the cookies for dessert, both of them rolling their eyes with exaggerated pleasure as they ate.

  Kimberly told the voices in her head to knock it off. She did this from time to time, whenever she started to contemplate all the other careers that would have allowed her more time with her rapidly aging and changing daughter. Nurse? Maybe. Teacher? Perhaps. Accountant, computer programmer, blackjack dealer, surgeon. Nope, nope, nope, nope. There’d only ever been one job for her, one career she wanted. And she had it.

  She’d spend time with Maria that weekend . . . or the next week. Once Giles Caldwell was found. Alive, she hoped. Peter, for all his faults, was an excellent father, and he’d see that Maria ate right and brushed her teeth and finished her homework. The girl was in good hands.

  And even Jennifer, shiny-haired Jennifer, didn’t bother her. That much. The True Detective thing they would have to work on. . . .

  Just do your job, she told herself. Wrap this up as soon as you can, but do it right.

  Her spirits lifted when she saw Brandon Ehrlich, one of her fellow detectives. He’d promised to come see her as soon as he heard from the state crime lab. She finished chewing the piece of cookie, swallowed, and wiped her face with the back of her hand, a decidedly unladylike gesture, but who was she trying to impress?

  “Brandon,” she said, “tell me something good. Let’s avoid another ass chewing.”

  Brandon Ehrlich was thirty, ten years younger than Kimberly. He was already losing his hair and seemed to be compensating with a rigorous workout schedule that saw him run close to fifty miles a week. He and his wife had a newborn son at home, and just the thought of a newborn made Kimberly feel tired. Even more tired than dealing with an intensely driven, smarter-than-average preteen.

  “I’ve got the report.”

  “And you’re going to tell me the key to Giles Caldwell’s disappearance is in there, right? That all of our questions will be answered by that report.”

  Brandon stared at her for a moment. “All of our questions will be answered by this report.”

  “Seriously?” Kimberly asked, her hopes rising.

  “No,” Brandon said.

  “Shit.” She reached over and broke off another piece of cookie. She offered it to Brandon, who refused because he hadn’t eaten refined sugar in six months or something ridiculous like that. It was no way to live, no way at all. “Okay, tell me what we’ve got. Any hits on fingerprints?”

  Brandon shook his head. “There were a lot of prints in the house. Giles Caldwell might have had money, but you saw he didn’t clean much. Lots of prints. Everywhere.”

  “I figured he’d have a cleaning person.”

  “Nope. Whatever usable prints they found, they ran through all the databases. Nothing.”

  “Figures. What about blood? Any traces we couldn’t see?” Kimberly asked.

  “Nothing. They’re still working on the hair and fiber analysis, but we need a suspect to match it to. That’s about all we’ve got.”

  “Great. I won’t buy any lottery tickets today either.”

  “What about Giles’s ex-wife? Anything there?”

  “I just got off the phone with her half an hour ago,” Kimberly said. “Nothing useful. They divorced years ago. She walked away with a tidy sum, and it doesn’t even look like they speak to each other. She lives in Idaho.”

  “Kids?”

  “None.”

  “And we’ve talked to his lovely brother, Simon. He was a piece of work.”

  “Yeah,” Kimberly said, “like we really needed his theories on what happened to Giles. What were they? Central American gangs? The neighbor who complained because Giles left his trash cans out too long once?”

  “Don’t forget a nei
ghborhood kid selling candy. Have we had a rash of Girl Scouts murdering grown men?”

  “Not that I’m aware of,” Kimberly said. “He’s worse than the nuts who send us notes with the letters they cut out of magazines. That’s why I didn’t give him my cell number. He can call me here if he wants to talk. I don’t need his heat with no light.”

  Brandon tapped the report against his knee, making a low thwacking noise. “By the way, what was he doing this past weekend when his brother supposedly disappeared?”

  “We’re piecing it all together,” Kimberly said. “He says he went to a lecture on campus one night. A poker game with friends another. He lives alone too, so he has a lot of time unaccounted for.”

  “Hmm,” Brandon said.

  “Yeah. Yesterday, he comes in here and pitches a fit about his brother missing. But something seems off about the guy. Don’t you think?”

  “He’s pushy. And he has the two assaults on his record.”

  “He seemed more concerned about chewing us out than his brother’s welfare. Did you notice that? He didn’t show any real emotion over the fact his brother might be in danger.”

  “Sure. That could just be his way. Some people respond to grief with anger.”

  “Or maybe he protests too much. I told him we’ll call when we know anything. I’m hoping he backs off a little, but I’m not ruling anything out about him.”

  A phone rang and rang on another desk, and a uniformed officer picked it up. A door near the front of the room opened and closed, slamming shut loudly, but Kimberly ignored it. She heard the same noise hundreds of times a day and had given up wondering why the maintenance crew failed to fix it.

  “It doesn’t look like Giles has a lot of friends,” Kimberly said, eyeing the rest of the cookie. “He just works a lot. He’s focused on the job. His business partner is out of the country but is flying back soon.”

  “Nothing at the office?”